Devlog Blog Post #1

Brainstorming:

 When the project started I knew that I wanted to build to project, except music, from start to finish by myself. This included art, sound effects, animations and much more. To accomplish this I had to a while coming up with an idea to match the theme "Win to lose".  After a lot of reflecting I decided that the only games I gained nothing by playing are the games I haven't played. This gave me my winning and losing conditions!

Development:

I started development by creating a tile-set for my level and my main character. I decided to create a character that has a reason to reach the afterlife, a monk. This was the basis of my game and really set the tone for the rest of the development. I then created an angel, a devil and assets for a scene they would each exist in for the start and end of the game. I then added my assets into Unity and started programming. The programming started with a basic pick-up item and a character controller that could jump and move through the world. I then created a basic level using the Unity tile map system and noticed that the world looked empty. I went back to the art and created 3 different trees and leaf sets that I could swap around to make different trees. I created some clouds and a grass asset and a stick to give the world some diversity. For the pickup assets I decided that fruit would be something friendly enough that the player wouldn't feel picking up and made an apple and an orange. To make these fruits part of the living world I gave them a couple facial features. Moving on I threw them into the game and played around with the game a bit to get the movement speeds and jumping heights to feel good. I built out more of my level and added in a wasteland zone to stop the player from falling off the map if they managed to live long enough to reach it. This provided a form of goal for the player to get to, but the world still didn't feel alive. I went into the Unity animation system and started by animating an idle animation and an running animation for each of my assets. During the animation phase I quickly felt that the world was coming alive. I hooked all the animations up and the game looked great, but jumping now felt really dull. I just used the squash and stretch method for my animations and wanted to continue learning more about animations, so I took a look at a couple public animation blogs that covered the basic animation techniques. I settled on learning the telegraphing/projecting method for my jump and tried to make it look great. I really enjoyed what I came up with and was happy when I finally got to see it in the game. The game was basically done, but there was nothing that really pressured the player to do something, no ques to direct their gameplay, so I decided to do this with a little bit of UI work. I went back into Adobe Illustrator and created a pocket watch to use as a timer. I also created some hands and a skull to represent the game ending. I also decided to create a visual representation of the game ending by making some heads for the good and the bad ending to the game. Once I hooked these things up I was ready for testing!

Testing:

I had a few friends play the game knowing that I still needed to add music and sound effects. They enjoyed figuring out how to beat the game, so the goal of the game was a huge success. As game designers they asked if they could help with sound effects and had some very interesting ideas on what the game should sound like. I took their advice and added in some sound effects that dramatically changed the feel of the game in a great way.

Polish Phases:

When it came to polishing the project I wanted to make the world feel alive. I did this by animating the clouds and creating impact effects for various scene objects, such as grass. This was my favorite part of the project and I really enjoyed it. I decided that winning and losing didn't feel as good as it should and created a scene for the winning and losing variations to the credits screen. 

This project took around 35-40 hours in total and was a lot of fun to work on. Special thanks to all my testers and contributors.